The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Large-capacity event facilities such as stadiums and arenas normally control entry to an event using pre-purchased tickets. Each fan, patron or customer (“user”) who wishes to attend an event must purchase or obtain a ticket in advance, and the ticket is valid only for a particular event, represented by a particular day, time, and venue or location. To prevent unauthorized duplication of tickets, encoding mechanisms are used on the tickets. Some encoding mechanisms, such as printed barcodes, are capable of forgery, and therefore the security of the venue and enforcement of valid ticketing requires the venue to be able to scan or read and validate a large number of tickets in a short period of time. For example, a venue might need to read and validate 10,000 tickets in a 30-minute time period to accommodate the sudden arrival of a large crowd at a particular event.
Multiple different encoding mechanisms have been developed including printed barcodes and printed QR codes, as well as codes that are digitally displayed on the display screen of a mobile computing device such as a smartphone held by the user. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags also offer potential use in ticketing, and some smartphones equipped with near-field communication (NFC) transmitters are capable of operating in an RFID emulation mode in which the smartphone appears to generate a signal coming from an RFID tag.
The emergence of these technologies presents large-capacity venues with new challenges. For example, fans attending a sports event may present any one of the foregoing ticketing mechanisms as their valid ticket, and the venue cannot predict in advance the number or order in which these mechanisms will be used. Whether a fan provides a printed ticket with a barcode, a QR code displayed on a smartphone screen, or a smartphone that is generating a ticket code via NFC is unpredictable at the time of an event. Therefore, venues have a need to scan, read and validate any of the foregoing kinds of identifiers on a high-speed basis, with minimum involvement of staff and with the smallest, most efficient equipment.